Annie Hall, Normal Neuroses, and the Mainspring of Human Activity

The recent posts about Woody Allen and Lucian Freud reminded me of a scene in Annie Hall where, shortly after explaining that “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable,” Alvy recommends Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death to Annie. Written in 1973, it is Becker’s evaluation of human psychology from a Freudian and post-Freudian perspective. In it, he argues that Freud’s (in)famous argument that people are fundamentally libidinal—that is driven by sexual desire—was descriptively accurate but specifically misguided; the real motivation behind people’s subconscious maladies lies not in the hyper-sexual realm but rather in the existential reality of their own mortality. As he states in the opening pages:

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” (ix)

While it is intellectually fashionable to argue that people are fundamentally different than they were 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, one can’t help but notice parallels between Becker’s psychological analysis of this primal fear and the very thing that St. Paul believes that the Gospel addresses. In 1 Cor. 15:55 he states: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

Part one of The Denial of Death concerns what Becker calls the quest for “heroism.” In short, this quest is the result of a foundational narcissism that is a constitutive part of human nature. Becker paraphrases Aristotle as saying, “luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.” This morbid narcissism which positions the human at the center of his/her entire universe is the motivating drive behind the impulse to the “heroic.” Paradoxically, Becker argues that while the heroism is usually accomplished through unrealistic transference, it actually is that which allows for a modicum of “healthy” living. In short, the human must develop ways of coping with his mortality by developing “immortality measures” which allow for the release of anxiety and fear. He writes:

“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.” (26)

This split necessitates a base level of denial and transference. As Pascal comments, “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” (27) The rest of the book concerns the various ways of interpreting and dealing with this particular “necessary madness.”

In order to exist within the basic framework of fear, Becker argues that people must harness the positive transferential aspects of their self-made reality in order to function. As Freud comments, “[humans] constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” (133) Becker continues, “and we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.” (133) In this way, Becker both exposes the real self-deception underlying human nature and argues that without it, humans would not be able to function.

It is through this insight that Becker makes one of his most provocative statements: mental illness is a result of the inability for a human to develop the necessary illusions of heroics. He explains:

“From this vantage point the theory of mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled—unable to exercise the ‘normal cultural heroism’ of other members of society.” (248)

It is at this point that Becker makes his sweeping turn from the state of psychoanalytical insight towards the culture at large. He has made a compelling case for the general need for illusion to cover over the more stark and dire reality of human mortality; however, he has been reluctant to proscribe a realm of “positive transference.” Here, he begins to describe “positive heroism” which, evidently, are those aspects of a person’s transferential reality that manifest in positive ways. The goal of the psychoanalyst is not to remove the necessary illusion; rather, it is to buttress or counterbalance those areas of the positive illusion which have become unstable.

“Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life’s way.” (269)

This dire prognosis ends with Becker admitting that “traditional” religious mythology provides a healthy and positive way of dealing with the terrors of human mortality. He agrees with psychologist Norman Brown, who “realized that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond.” (285) Indeed.

8 comments

What a post!! From Annie Hall to Ernest Becker! You capture insights of Becker so efficiently. I read it a couple of years ago after being strongly encouraged only to find that out how thick it was! What a book and defense.

When I was in Steven Pinker’s course entitled The Human Mind, he argued that our idea of God and the afterlife is what some scientists call a “Spandrel”–a term from architecture for the structure that exists between two arches NOT because you designed this structure, but because its a by-product of the arches’ structure.

So, the argument goes, early human beings would like at a dead body and conceptualize that body and spirit must be separate things since a body apparently can exist without a spirit. The next logical jump was to see unexplainable phenomena and assume they are the product of spirits that exist without bodies. From there, its only a hop, skip, and a jump to believing that a spirit is a Spirit and there exist gods.

Then, Pinker said, you take the Freudian ideas of wish-fulfillment fantasies and transference to father-figures, and sooner or later on of the gods becomes God.

He buttresses this with one other idea: the evolutionary advantage of faith in “meaning”. If a hunter is walking through the forest and sees a set of deer tracks, he can do one of two things. Either he can see holes in the ground and keep aimlessly searching for food, or he can assign meaning to the tracks: “a deer passed this way, and if I follow these tracks, I can catch him and eat.” Since the one who creates a meaning for what he sees in nature gets more food, he survives, passes his genes on, and thus natural selection assures that the ones who believe the world to be meaningful are the ones who populate the earth.

So now we have both God and meaning as concepts that naturally evolve in the human psyche. Obviously I think Pinker would agree with the overall idea expressed in your post: “illusion” (namely, the illusions that God is real and that the universe is meaningful) is essential to our survival.

This is where Jordan Hylden turned me on to Walker Percy’s little book “Lost in the Cosmos.” In it, Percy said that a scientist or a philosopher can survive by saying that God and meaning are illusions BECAUSE in so doing the scientist gives his own life meaning (this idea) and a God (himself). But anyone who HEARS the idea gets depressed because the necessary illusions are removed and nothing is left to buttress the human psyche.

SO ALL THAT TO ASK YOU THIS, Jady!! Do you think it matters whether God and meaning are illusions? Do we perpetuate illusions that make life meaningful simply because they keep us from falling hopelessly into the grave? Or are the ideas able to engender transcendence only because they are true?

I’m not Jady, but I think it matters. To quote Paul: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” (1 Cor. 15:17-19)

What I find helpful from Becker is the intersection of what I take as the Biblical description of the human condition and his psychological observations. Nevertheless, as for his (and, presumably, Pinker’s) materialism, I reject that flat out while realizing that’s a move that has no ultimate rational basis; I’m arguing from a belief in, to borrow Kierkegaard, the “eternal consciousness.” It could turn out that it has only been the Übermenschen who have been able to both rise above the illusion and live with some sort of joy in the face of meaninglessness, but I do not count myself among that group!

I’m helped by a quote from Gerhard Ebeling (you may recognize it). “. . . the suspicion still lingers that this (Christianity) is a theology which only brings in God to satisfy a human need. But one must be cautious in advancing this objection. It would be dangerous theology which was NOT orientated towards human need and therefore towards the aspect of necessity.”

This helps me. The basic question is whether there is any meaning to life, and, as has been (rightly) argued, without some sort of God there can be no ultimate basis. So, I’m perfectly comfortable resting in my (admittedly subjective) assertion that life does have meaning.

Honestly, I don’t think that many people have a problem with this. The problems arise when a particular conception of God is irrevocably shaken or destroyed; this is what drives people to either functional agnosticism—where you throw up your hands in a metaphysical “whatever” and pick up a new hobby—or extreme activism. (As an aside, I think that this is part of the growing interest in “new monasticism.”)

People’s “heroic illusions” can be understood as a type of religious framework; their lives of service and sacrifice make sense in light of their God. Take firemen for instance. While there may be some firemen who are just pyromaniacs, most of the ones I’ve met operate with more of an elevated sense of civic duty and national pride than most people. That is not to say that firemen worship the nation, but these everyday “illusions” are part of a more complex system of “illusion” that ultimately rests on some conception of God.

So, when these little “illusions” start to crack, things are OK because they rest on a more sure foundation. But what happens when the foundation starts to crack? That’s the question that we’re faced with today. The growing cynicism and nihilism are not because people have evolved intellectually into more rational creatures; rather, it is that the illusions upon which they (subconsciously) based their lives have started to crack. It doesn’t really matter what the idea, or illusion, is.

I think that the Law/Gospel and its relationship to fear and control has a lot to say about this. What are these “illusions” other than ways people serve their own projected understanding of God? As long as the system remains intact, things operate in a healthy way. Can the system survive a cross? That’s the question.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve answered your question, but I’m operating under the illusion that I have for the time being!

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